Sunil Doshi, whose company Alliance Media & Entertainment produced 2017 Tokyo film festival title “Bioscopewala” and distributed Jafar Panahi’s 2018 film “3 Faces” in India, has launched a new content development platform at the ongoing Asian TV Forum & Market in Singapore.

“ATS wants to tell true, real stories about real people where corporate media is not able to go because of various compulsions that they have,” Doshi told Variety. ATS has initially commissioned several journalists to research and write 12 long-form feature stories, ranging in length from 10,000 to 30,000 words. The stories will be published weekly on an online platform called 52, which is expected to go live in six months from now.

“When we do a story, our optics on this are multimedia,” Doshi said. “These true stories will lend themselves to podcasts, audio-visual nonfiction form storytelling, docudramas, documentaries, translated into multiple foreign languages for syndication and licensing purposes, and create many such media opportunities.”

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ATS is currently in the final stages of negotiations with Spotify and Audible to carry its content. They are also in discussions with major OTT platforms for co-production and distribution possibilities. “One of the reasons I am at ATF, Singapore, is to look at the ecosystem of nonfiction and documentary storytelling, and to get prospective partners attached to us,” Doshi said.

ATS is going beyond stories in English. “Our greatest treasures are lying in Malayalam, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi and all those languages,” said Doshi. “Today we gather our stories from regional languages, not from English newspapers. The deep-dive that the journalists who are humiliated by the cultural hegemony of English, are doing, this is the time for them, and for all kinds of storytellers to come out in the open.”

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